Statistical pass rate, omg Options

[Martin.Walters]

Grades are amateur ~ Diplomas are for professional development.

I can imagine many people taking their grade 8 getting through it,.. then comes the Diploma..

Its so risky, temptations and pressures.

A professional title before your name,
that impression of getting it meaning you can play almost everything (illusional)

People like to gamble for their qualifications to be the best.. but gambling brings fear,
especially if you hope to rest your career on such development.

My father says its better to do competitions as it pushes you to be the best you can be.
I would love to do a Diploma one day, but my fingers need a lot more strength/( alexander technique type stuff
to help reduce tension probably the better option)

[owainsutton]

... it's absolutely possible that marks would be adjusted during a moderation process.

Shifting grade boundaries for exams is one thing, but adjusting marks after the fact is completely different. What criteria would decide which candidates' marks get changed, and by how much?

Don't quote me on this, because it may have changed, and I am only giving here what an instrumental teacher told me years ago - but her understanding of the way grade exams were (are?) marked was that you would never fail by 1 mark. So if your marks added up to 99, the examiner would look at the exam as a whole and either add a mark to make it up to a pass, or deduct a mark if it wasn't quite up to standard. The only person I knew who failed by a small margin did have 98 marks, which bears out the theory.

Not sure if this is the kind of thing you meant, owainsutton, or if I've gone off at a tangent - but as RoseRodent says, marks can be adjusted during the moderation process.

If true (and I doubt it), then this adjustment is done by the examiner at the time, and so isn't part of the moderation process. By providing the original handwritten mark sheet, the board are confirming that the marks awarded are those assigned by the person who witnessed the exam.

The only exception to this, I suppose, is when a second examiner is present in order to moderate at the time.

[BerkshireMum]

Judging from the scoring on my piano exam (and knowing how I actually played in the exam - I had been hoping to scrape a pass so was overjoyed to get a distinction) and comparing that back many, many years to how accurate and musical I had to be to pass my LTCL flute there's a huge jump between grade 8 and first level diplomas. It's not surprising many fail, although you'd think that if they had a teacher, they would be able to advise whether or not ready to sit. Perhaps there are quite a few out there without a teacher/mentor?

From the ABRSM statistics, only about 1000 people pa sit diploma exams (there will be some entering for other boards, but it's still not a lot), so many teachers won't have much experience of diplomas. When BerkshireSon wanted to sit DipABRSM his teacher told me she had little idea of whether he would pass, because she had never entered anyone for this diploma before and was unsure of the standard required.

We had better advice from his accompanist, though, because she had done a lot of accompanying of diploma candidates and at their first rehearsal said she thought he was at about the right level. When she came out of the exam room (leaving my son to do the viva and Quick Study) she told me he would definitely have passed the recital part, which was very reassuring!

[RoseRodent]

I'm wondering whether closing dates for entry have anything to do with it also. If someone is playing at and around grade standard you can put in for the exam then spend the term preparing the material. I would find it very hard to judge in May whether I'd be ready for my diploma in July, unless I were to get the whole thing so ready by May that by July I was truly sick and tired of performing it.

[sbhoa]

I'm wondering whether closing dates for entry have anything to do with it also. If someone is playing at and around grade standard you can put in for the exam then spend the term preparing the material. I would find it very hard to judge in May whether I'd be ready for my diploma in July, unless I were to get the whole thing so ready by May that by July I was truly sick and tired of performing it.

I think that at this level you are into the territory where you need to live with things for a lot longer.
One consideration when choosing pieces would be 'can I live with it for long enough?'
I think that you'd have to be very experienced and confident to enter for any dip. level exam while there was still work to do one pieces to get them up to standard.
I've generally wanted to be pretty well fully prepared at point of entry for grade exams....

[nicki_flute]

With both of my diplomas, my pieces definitely haven't been performance ready when I entered (I think about 3 months in advance for my ATCL, and 6 months ahead for LTCL), so I just had to make sure they were by the time the exam came. I trust my teacher's judgement and am prepared to work hard to ensure they reach the standard. This was with Trinity, so the deadlines might be done differently.

[andante_in_c]

There is "standard" and "standard" too: my DipABRSM pupil has been trying out all the pieces/movements in various festivals and competitions over the last eighteen months, so she has had to get things to a performable standard for those. But we've been looking at them at a deeper level over the last term in order to bring the performance more to life. Learning at this level is far more of a spiral than linear, I've found.

[RoseRodent]

I'm wondering whether closing dates for entry have anything to do with it also. If someone is playing at and around grade standard you can put in for the exam then spend the term preparing the material. I would find it very hard to judge in May whether I'd be ready for my diploma in July, unless I were to get the whole thing so ready by May that by July I was truly sick and tired of performing it.

I think that at this level you are into the territory where you need to live with things for a lot longer.
One consideration when choosing pieces would be 'can I live with it for long enough?'
I think that you'd have to be very experienced and confident to enter for any dip. level exam while there was still work to do one pieces to get them up to standard.
I've generally wanted to be pretty well fully prepared at point of entry for grade exams....

But as a member of this forum you come into a small contingent of people who are better informed than average. If people have done the grade system then fallen face first into the Dip because it "comes next" and have prepared for it similarly to the way they have prepared for the grades then failure is perhaps more likely?

[Scooby Doo]

A 50% pass rate for a professional level exam is not that bad if you look at pass rates in other professions. In a former existence, I sat a two part postgraduate diploma that had a 5% first time pass rate for each part!

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[owainsutton]

A 50% pass rate for a professional level exam is not that bad if you look at pass rates in other professions. In a former existence, I sat a two part postgraduate diploma that had a 5% first time pass rate for each part!

The diplomas occupy something of a no-man's-land.

If they're not an academic qualification, then they're a professional one, in which case what do they qualify people for? How many Wigmore Hall recitalists have a DipABRSM?

If they're an academic qualification, then we could start wondering how they fit into the system....

Or could we just accept that they're different? They're accredited, they get brownie points in accordance with the NQF, but the most important thing is that fellow musicians can rely on these qualifications as an unvarying standard.

[RoseRodent]

Yes, I find them difficult as to where they fit in. The descriptions say that the DipA should be equivalent to the end of first year principal study. I have actually passed the first year of principal study in a pratical music degree and used many of the pieces from the dip syllabus, so in many ways I should be able to say I'm at the same level... but I still feel like I don't have the same standard as someone who has a dip.... why?